Earlier in the week, we received news that Phase 2 will start from Fri 19 Jun. The timing couldn’t have been better. I wasn’t looking forward to another birthday and father’s day celebration at home after we celebrated my wife’s birthday and mother’s day at home back in Apr and May. You can imagine my excitement when we found out Phase 1 would be over earlier than we expected.
So we took leave on Fri 19 Jun and planned a number of celebrations. It seemed like the most natural thing for us to do having been starved of socialising outside of our family for the past 2 months. We should be going out for personal care appointments, shopping, having lunches by ourselves, and dinners with families and friends. And we are feeling better now that our social life is starting to get back on track. While things may never go back to normal, we are happy just to be able to go out for fun.
Anyway, we are likely to continue our work from home arrangements for Phase 2. There does not appear to be a rush for us to go back into the office anytime soon. And we are okay to take our time with this. It has gotten more difficult to keep our focus while working from home with the baby growing up and becoming more aware of our presence. He wants our attention more often when he’s awake and playing or eating. While the helper continues to take on more of his caretaking responsibility during the day, we find ourselves increasingly involved in his daily activities.
This can be tough to navigate when work picks up for either of us, or worse, for the both of us during the week. Like what happened recently. It was a challenging time but we managed to get through it. Our jobs remain intact for now but we know these 2 years will be a critical period of time. My job at a local bank is more stable and secure but has a lower pay. My wife’s job at a foreign bank is less stable and secure but has a higher pay. And it seems like major restructuring is back on the agenda for her bank. The pressure is always there for her bank to move roles back to its head office location from its overseas office location when times are bad.
Like now, there’s a more urgent push by my wife’s bank towards reducing costs in the face of declining revenue at an overseas office location. The good thing is that it tries to avoid layoffs but rather cut jobs via natural attrition. Meaning it just doesn’t replace a staff that leaves i.e. headcount and employee costs still go down. This means that the same workload gets spread across fewer people and they get overworked. Which can lead to a negative cycle of more people leaving over time. Nothing is ever fair but at least it gives her time to prepare an exit strategy knowing what direction the bank is headed.
I don’t have the same problem because I already work in the head office location of the local bank. I just need to weather the bad times with everyone else but there’s less pressure to cut roles and reduce headcount. To ensure the mostly local staff here still have jobs. This stability lowers my retrenchment risk (at the cost of my lower pay) and hedges against my wife’s higher retrenchment risk (at the reward of her higher pay). We have been taking turns doing this for each other in the last decade to ensure at least one of us remains employed at any point in time. Both of us being jobless at the same time would be a disaster.
I won’t say the employment situation is looking bleak for us at the moment. But it’s definitely not good because trying to move jobs now is a bad idea. Too easy for the new offer to be rescinded and for us to get caught out without a job. This has already happened to a few people we know. Even with countries re-opening, it would take a long time for economic activity to resume at a sustainable pace. Based on what we have seen, it looks like we will enter a period of slow economic growth. Which is going to have a sustained negative impact on our lifetime earnings.
As we got busier in the past 2 weeks, we had less time to monitor our investments. There was a small market fall but it has since rebounded. Essentially, nothing interesting has happened for us to manually enter the market. Our automated weekly Dollar Cost Averaging of ETFs continues to increase our vested position and it’s an effective strategy in a volatile market. Cash is still recovering from the big lump sum manual investment made back in Mar. And we are just letting it build for now as a hedge against the tricky and uncertain times ahead we are about to navigate.